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Our effectiveness and impact as a leader is directly tied to our ability to experience empathy. Whether your leadership is in your home, your place of work, your church, your peers, or anywhere… you will only be able to inspire and influence to the degree that we can feel what other people feel. And while empathy comes easier to some than others, I am also convinced that empathy can be learned. But nothing is learned if it’s not valued.

I’ve had a lot of opportunity to think lately about what it is that compels me to “run into the darkness”... what is it that makes this born-and-bred North American girl, with a tendency toward cleanliness and comfort, spend so much time in the darkest and most uncomfortable places of the world?

Everything would change if we completely understood we are absolutely loved. I mean everything. Imagine your life was lived each moment, knowing in every fibre of your being, that God is madly and endlessly in love with you? And then imagine you couldn’t help but live out an unconditional love that mirrors the very image of how God loves.

We live in such an unsafe world. Physically yes, but more damaging, emotionally. Do people feel emotionally open and safe around you or do they feel emotionally protected and fearful in your presence? Some questions.

In my travel to about 40 different countries over the past 20 years I've encountered and engaged a lot of religion. I have toured many churches, temples, shrines, mosques and monasteries. I have been in the most ornate and invaluable holy sites and I have also been in worship places carved out of rock and made of mud and sticks. I have discussed faith with Buddhist Priests, Muslim Imams, Hindus, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Orthodox Priests, many different flavors of Christian leaders of various denominational backgrounds, agnostics and fervent atheists. I have had my fill of religion.

How do you think the world would respond if a world leader filled 48 Boeing 747’s with children, with just enough fuel to take off, and then watched them crash…and did this each and every day?

We would be sickened. It would completely take over the world’s attention. The international community would…freak out…unify…take military action…and do whatever it took and as soon as possible to immediately stop such a preventable crime against humanity.